Hal glanced at his watch. It was nearly 12:15. 'Hurry. I want to be gone before your mother gets back.'
'Where are we going?'
'To Uncle Will's and Aunt Ida's,' Hal said. 'To the home place.'
Hal went into the bathroom, looked behind the toilet, and got the bowl brush leaning there. He took it back to the window and stood there with it in his hand like a cut-rate magic wand. He looked out at Petey in his melton shirt-jacket, crossing the parking lot with his flight bag, DELTA showing clearly in white letters against a blue field. A fly bumbled in an upper comer of the window, slow and stupid with the end of the warm season. Hal knew how it felt.
He watched Petey hunt up three good-sized rocks and then start back across the parking lot. A car came around the comer of the motel, a car that was moving too fast, much too fast, and without thinking, reaching with the kind of reflex a good shortstop shows going to his fight, the hand holding the brush flashed down, as if in a karate chop ... and stopped.
The cymbals closed soundlessly on his intervening hand, and he felt something in the air. Something like rage.
The car's brakes screamed. Petey flinched back. The driver motioned to him, impatiently, as if what had almost happened was Petey's fault, and Petey ran across the parking lot with his collar flapping and into the motel's rear entrance.
Sweat was running down Hal's chest; he felt it on his forehead like a drizzle of oily rain. The cymbals pressed coldly against his hand, numbing it.
The fly bumbled and buzzed, trying to find the cold October sunshine that seemed so close.
Pete came bursting in, breathing quickly, cheeks rosy. 'I got three good ones, Dad, I ' He broke off. 'Are you all right, Daddy?'
'Fine,' Hal said. 'Bring the bag over.'
Hal hooked the table by the sofa over to the window with his foot so it stood below the sill, and put the flight bag on it. He spread its mouth open like lips. He could see the stones Petey had collected glimmering inside. He used the toilet-bowl brush to hook the monkey forward. It teetered for a moment and then felt into the bag. There was a faint
'Dad? Daddy?' Petey sounded frightened. Hal looked around at him. Something was different: something had changed. What was it?
Then he saw the direction of Petey's gaze and he knew. The buzzing of the fly had stopped. It lay dead on the windowsill.
'Did the monkey do that?' Petey whispered.
'Come on,' Hal said, zipping the bag shut. 'I'11 tell you while we ride out to the home place.'
'How can we go'? Mom and Dennis took the car.' 'Don't worry,' Hal said, and ruffled Petey's hair.
He showed the desk clerk his driver's license and a twenty-dollar bill. After taking Hal's Texas Instruments digital watch as collateral, the clerk handed Hal the keys to his own car a battered AMC Gremlin. As they drove east on Route 302 toward Casco, Hal began to talk, haltingly at first, then a little faster. He began by telling Petey that his father had probably brought the monkey home with him from overseas, as a gift for his sons. It wasn't a particularly unique toy--there was nothing strange or valuable about it. There must have been hundreds of thousands of wind-up monkeys in the world, some made in Hong Kong, some in Taiwan, some in Korea. But somewhere along the line perhaps even in the dark back closet of the house in Connecticut where the two boys had begun their growing up something had happened to the monkey. Something bad. It might be, Hal said as he tried to coax the clerk's Gremlin up past forty, that some bad things maybe even most bad things weren't even really awake and aware of what they were. He left it there because that was probably as much as Petey could understand, but his mind continued on its own course. He thought that most evil might be very much like a monkey full of clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork tums, the cymbals begin to beat, the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh ... or appear to laugh ....
